A Fistful of Denarii (The Eagle, Kevin MacDonald, US/UK, 2011, 114 mins) Iraq War allegory? Migration Era western? Swords-and-sandals epic? Roman bromance? Director Kevin MacDonald’s (State of Play, The Last King of Scotland) latest cinematic offering, The Eagle, is hampered by a debilitating identity crisis. On paper, however, MacDonald’s film, adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s boy’s [...]
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The Slow Wave They say he helped take the guns at Carentan; Was offered cold steel upon the breast And within the thigh for his time and trouble. They say his fortune was found in the ash of war, In sepia stone and a deluge of pale white cheques, Long squandered with Kings [...]
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Dead in the Blackwater (Route Irish, Ken Loach, UK/France/Italy/Belgium/Spain, 2011, 109 mins) Mercenaries, murder, torture and the Iraq War; after the whimsy of 2009’s Looking for Eric, Ken Loach returns to the shadows with Route Irish. The piece follows intense Liverpudlian Fergus (Mark Womack) – an ex-SAS officer – as he searches for answers concerning [...]
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Why the Levees Broke (The Big Uneasy, Harry Shearer, USA, 2010, 98 mins) Almost six years after Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans, the disaster’s place in American popular consciousness remains second only to that of one dark day in mid-September, 2001. Causing almost 2,000 deaths and more than $90 billion worth of [...]
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‘Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap’ It takes a brave man to enter a warzone; it takes a braver man to enter a warzone clutching a camera instead of a gun. For most of his long career, photographer Tim Hetherington has been documenting life in some of the world’s most destructive and bloody conflicts. Spending eight years [...]
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Athlone We followed the footsteps Down to the Old Red Gates, Where Frost perched upon The fading paint first laid down By men known only through Wall-mounted moments. Before us sat the endless fields, Which now held only earth; The verge where Ossian fell Bore our sole crop of Bared boards and nails. [...]
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All Roads Lead to Rome In the same way that the real world, from Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire to the Soviet Union’s Cold War hegemony over half of Europe, has continually sought to recreate some semblance of the Roman Empire, the filmic world has long held a fascination with the opulence, power, and brutality of Ancient [...]
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The Quick and The (Un)Dead As the old saying goes, there’s never a good time to be involved in a zombie epidemic. Still, the noughties have proved to be a particularly poor era to try and escape ravenous legions of the undead. Almost every zombie film previously, from 1932’s genre grandfather White Zombie, through George [...]
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Requiem for a Rock Star In what many outside the industry may consider a shock, indie-darling Darren Aronofsky’s latest offering, Black Swan, will be scored by the man responsible for the grunge-tronic sounds of early-nineties ‘classics’ such as Beaver Patrol, I Was a Teenage Granddad, and the memorable paean to an Italian porn star-turned-politician, Touched By [...]
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Last Rites (A Congregation of Ghosts, Mark Collicott, UK, 2009, 93 mins) Laurence Olivier once referred to him as the man with a name that sounds like a fart in a bathtub. To many, he was better known as a celibate British policeman, burned alive by Scottish cultists. To a generation of television viewers, he [...]
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